May 1968 was not a franco-french, hexagonal affair. It was a global event. One would speak of it very differently if it had not resonated with, not only the occupied factories decked with red flags, but also with the Tet offensive of February 1968 in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, the student agitation in Poland, the rebellion of Pakistani youth, the anti-war movement in the United States, the last embers of the cultural revolution in China, the massacre of Tlatelolco, to the raised black gloved fists on the Olympic podium of Mexico. 1968 is thus a symbolic date for a propitious instant, when the despotic edifice of Stalinism revealed its cracks, or the anti-bureaucratic struggles of the East, the colonial revolutions in Algeria, Indochina, Palestine, in the Portuguese colonies, seemed to be able to associate with the mobilisation of workers in France and Italy. The reflux of the 1960s opened the path to the counter-attack of the Thatcher-Reagan years. The spectre of the social and profane revolution receded. The time of velvet and sacred revolutions had arrived.
Daniel Bensaïd and Alain Krivine, 1968: Fins et suites
1968 was a year a of uprisings, to borrow Alain Badiou’s expression. To suggest however that all of the protests, social movements, wars of national liberation, revolutions, shared the same aims, methods, context, or that they were somehow all coordinated, would be absurd. But something was in the air, in the background, that served as an agent of resonance and contagion. Struggles of national liberation and “third worldism” were at their height (animated by the Tricontinental movement or OSPAAAL), and the outcry against the US war in Vietnam knew no borders. In North American, insitutional politics was strained to contain radical political challenges, while blacks fought to radicalise the older civil rights movements (and with Martin Luther King’s assassination in early April of 1968, would rise up across the country). South America was seemingly overwhelmed with Castroist guerrilla movements and in 1970, the Socialist Party would win Chile’s elections, apparently offering up the possibility of a social-democratic path to social change. The “developed” world was for its part not immune to the contamination, with France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece all experiencing major radical social and political contestation throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
We share an essay by Miguel Amorós critically analysing the situationist reading of and role in May 68 (from libcom.org), followed by a series of Situationist texts from the events of May 68 …
A brief review of the role played by the situationists, the enragés, and the Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO—composed of “about forty people”) in the movement of May 1968 in France, which the situationists claimed was an aborted “revolution”, but whose “only major victory”, according to Amorós, was “its survival in memory” for, “contrary to the assertions of the SI, the modernization of capitalism and the general proletarianization of the population … did not produce new, broader, and more intransigent forces of denial”, as the spectacle “subjugated its antagonists by manipulating their desires and satisfying false needs”, and its “mercenary thinkers finished the job”.
People strolled, dreamed, learned how to live. … For the first time youth really existed. Not the social category invented for the needs of the commodity economy by sociologists and economists, but the only real youth, of life lived without dead time …
René Viénet
We share the Situationist essay signed by René Viénet (though very likely a collective work), Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, written immediately in the aftermath of May 1968. (Published in english by Autonomedia, in 1992, and translated by Loren Goldner and Paul Sieveking. Available online at Situationist International online.) The Situationists were in no sense the hidden “leaders” of a leaderless movement. Their theoretical work however before and their participation in, the May events, would serve to orient many.
But as May 68 waned in the month of June, Viénet would write that what was lacking was “theoretical” consciousness among the protagonists; and one can only wonder at such an “explanation”.
Viénet, in his criticism of the orthodox Left in the May events, would go on to produce one of the most emblematic examples of détournement in cinema: “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” (1972) A gesture of impotence, of recollection, of resistance? Perhaps all of these and more.
VI. To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to
take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism
it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust
itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of
tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as
the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver
tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the
Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the
Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in
the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the
enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
VII. Fustel de Coulanges recommended to the historian, that if he wished to reexperience an epoch, he should remove everything he knows about the later course of history from his
head. There is no better way of characterizing the method with which historical
materialism has broken. It is a procedure of empathy. Its origin is the heaviness at heart,
the acedia, which despairs of mastering the genuine historical picture, which so fleetingly
flashes by. The theologians of the Middle Ages considered it the primary cause of
melancholy. Flaubert, who was acquainted with it, wrote: “Peu de gens devineront
combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.” [Few people can guess how
despondent one has to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.] The nature of this melancholy
becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of
historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who
currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy
with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite
enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches
in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled
underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession.
They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon
with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel
of a lineage [Abkunft: descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its
existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the
nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture,
which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from
barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one
set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as
measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
Walter Benjamin, On the concept of history
To speak of May 68 is not to merely mark an anniversary; it is to keep alive a memory of rebellion for the present, as present.
The politics of memory is often reduced to commemoration, when in fact it hides a politics of struggle over what remains possible still. And before the erasure of memory of dissidence and disobedience, we celebrate the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the french uprising, however modestly, to keep a past, present.
The effort to domesticate the events of May has been constant, above all in france. What was the largest general strike in the country’s history is reduced to a middle class student rebellion, what was a movement that echoed struggles elsewhere (above all, anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Vietnam) is dismissed as idiosyncratically national, what spilled over any calendarisation of the events’ resonances is reduced to the months of May and June of 1968, what was an essentially anti-authoritarian political movement is caricaturised as concluding with philanthropic concerns for human rights, or worse, in hedonistic narcissism.
If we then engage in this exercise of celebration, it is because our political horizon (or the political horizon of those who stubbornly insist on imagining a world beyond capital) remains that of May 68, a political horizon far more vast than the caricatures.
The political lessons of May for the Left are far reaching: the illusions of an intrinsically revolutionary subject (of class, race, ethnicity, colonisation), the vanguard role of a revolutionary organisation (party or labour union), the primacy of the factory space as the location of revolutionary struggle and the secondariness of all other spaces of oppression, revolution as the seizure of central power, all of them die. And if this death is not yet recognised, fifty years on (as it was not at the time, by many), then “ideology” is indeed stronger than “reality”, or, to put matters differently, the Left is more comatose than those it supposedly struggles against.
We share below, in translation, a testimonial and an analysis of the events of May-June of 1968 by Tomás Ibáñez (a las barricadas 26/02/2018).
In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity remained unchanged and
it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new
distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is
directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with
labour …
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology
Overcoming alienation … involves the abolition of the self-grounding, self-moving Subject (capital) and of the form of labor that constitutes and is constituted by structures of alienation; this would allow humanity to appropriate what had been constituted in alienated form. Overcoming the historical Subject would allow people, for the first time, to become the subjects of their own social practices.
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and social domination
Moishe Postone died last March 19th. He leaves behind a rich theoretical and historical body of work that is of importance not only for marxists, but for all of those who in any way borrow from the work of Marx to critically understand the modern world (and there are few who do not).
They are just ghosts, the ones who think people fight to win! They fight because they like it.
And There Was Light, Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, blind hero of the French Resistance
From Conflictual Wisdom, through the hands of the Crimethinc collective (22/03/2018) …
Last week, comrades published Conflictual Wisdom, “Revolutionary Introspection towards the Preservation of the Anarchist Individual & Community.” In this collection, longtime anarchists reflect on how to maintain longevity while confronting seemingly invincible adversaries. Here, we present a refined version of one of the anonymous contributions, exploring how to understand the anarchist project outside a post-Christian millenarian narrative of redemption.
From the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, in solidarity with Marielle Franco and the many, many others arrested, tortured and killed by the brazilian state …
We republish this urgent statement of solidarity by our compañerxs with the Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (CAB) on the political assassination of Black socialist activist Marielle Franco. (Black Rose Anarchist Federation, 15/03/2018)
Statement By Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira (CAB) / Anarchist Coordination of Brazil
On the night of Wednesday, March 14, after leaving a debate with other Black women in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Lapa, Marielle Franco was brutally executed. The driver of the car that Marielle was in, Anderson Pedro Gomes, was slain as well.
The essay that we share below, by Andrew Robinson, bears the virtue of clarity; like a collector, he assembles the bits of Walter Benjamin’s work on messianism and revolution. And yet because he writes as a collector of ideas, Benjamin’s words fall as shards to the ground, unable to connect us to a past (even Benjamin’s), and thus to any future. There is at best the illusion of transmissability.
But then he, us, can perhaps do no better.
But then can we then do no better politically than create networks of do it yourself mutual aid? Does not Benjamin’s messianic time and politics call for a seeing beyond needs (and our need for a catalogue of Benjamin’s writings), or parody?
(So many questions).
The collapse of transmissability is what marks our time, a time without tradition, when the past is amassed like a pile of rubble and we can find no orientation within it, and thus no possibility for a future history.
If capitalism has destroyed lived history in the temporal linearity of commodity production and circulation, and thus tradition, no simple return to tradition is possible, except through rupture, except through a breach in time. But the breach cannot be grounded upon the demand for new ends; to propose goals is to invite capture by the reigning apparatuses of alienation. The end must become the means to reach it; the way is what is capable of generating new temporalities, through which new immediacies will call forth the spirits of the past in present eternities pregnant with possibility.
If crisis and political exception have become the norm, then fragmentation, theses and collections, are all that is possible for now. But crisis and exception, embraced, redeem these very fragments as the announcement of new times.
“Since the goal is already present and thus no path exists that could lead there, only
the perennially late stubbornness of a messenger whose message is nothing other than the task of transmission can give back to man, who has lost his ability to appropriate his historical space, the concrete space of his action and knowledge.”
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (page 70)
The long and winding May of 1968 (3): The italian autonomist movement
Autonomy is the body without organs of politics, anti-hierarchical, anti-dialectical, anti-representative. It is not only a political project, it is a project for existence.
Individuals are never autonomous: they depend on external recognition. The autonomous body is not exclusive or identifiable. It is beyond recognition. A body of workers, it breaks away from labour discipline; a body of militants, it ignores party organisation; a body of doctrine, it refuses ready-made classifications.
Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power. …
The body without organs of autonomy has no frontiers, but it does have a history, and this history is Italian.
Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, The Return of Politics
It would be impossible to summarise the long italian “May” of autonomism in a short text. And it will not be our aim to do so. It is enough to say that for those unfamiliar with the movement, that the literature dedicated to it is both extensive and rich, and that its practical and theoretical contribution to anti-capitalist struggles remains fundamental.
Modestly, we share below four short essays that provide both a partial history of the movement (which in this instance, more than in many others, must be read in the plural), as well as theoretical reflections arising from and inspired by autonomism.
We close with a documentary film dedicated to the life and work of Antonio Negri. And though Negri in no way represents the whole of the autonomist tradition and though we have serious theoretical differences with his work, the latter should not be simply dismissed.
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